‘Welcome home,’ she said, and that was really all there was to say.
We floated down, waving to our friends and ignoring their questions for the moment. Coypu and the time lab first, to report. There was a quick feeling of unhappiness that He had escaped me and the hope that this time, when he was tracked through time, a few very large bombs could be sent in the place of me or any other volunteer.
Coypu looked up and gaped. ‘What are you doing here?’ he said. ‘You are supposed to be eliminating this He person. Didn’t you get my message?’
‘Message?’ I asked, blinking rapidly.
‘Yes. We made ten thousand metal cubes and sent them back to Earth. Sure you would get one of them. Radio direction and such.’
‘Oh, that old message. Received and acted upon, but you are a little out of date. What is that doing here?’ I’m afraid my voice rose a bit on this last as I pointed with vibrating finger at the compact machine across the room.
‘That? Our Mark One compact folding time-helix? What else should it be doing? We have just finished it.’
‘You’ve never used it?’
‘Never.’
‘Well, you are now. You have to strap a couple of grav-chutes to it – here, use these – and a recorder and molecular disrupter and shoot it right back to save Angelina and me.’
‘I have a pocket recorder, but why …’ He took a familiar-looking machine from his lab coat.
‘Do it first, explanations later. Angelina and I are about to be blown up if you don’t do this right.’
I grabbed some paint and wrote ‘Play me’ on the recorder, then ‘Time-helix – open with care’ on the machine. The exact moment when He had left Earth was determined by the time tracer and the arrival for this cargo set for a few minutes later on the big helix. Coypu dictated the tape under my instruction, and it wasn’t until the whole bundle was whisked back into the past that I heaved a grateful sigh of relief.
‘We are saved,’ I said. ‘Now for that drink you promised me.’
‘I didn’t promise …’
‘I’ll have it anyway.’
Coypu was muttering to himself and scratching on a pad while I prepared some hefty drinks for Angelina and myself. We clunked glasses and were baptizing our throats when he came over, smiling genially.
‘I needed that,’ I said. ‘It must be ages since I last had a drink.’
‘It is all coming clear at last,’ Coypu said, tapping his protruding teeth with contained excitement.
‘Is it all right if we sit while we listen? It’s been a busy couple of thousand years.’
‘Yes, by all means. Let me retrace the course of events. A time attack was launched upon the Corps by He, a most successful one. Our numbers were quite reduced ….’
‘Yes, like down to two. You and me.’
‘Quite right. Though as soon as I had dispatched you to the year 1975, I found that all things were as they had been. Most sudden. All alone one instant, the next the laboratory full of people who never knew they had been gone. We put a lot of work in on improving the time-tracking techniques, took almost four years to get it the way we wanted.’
‘Did you say four years?’
‘Nearer five before we got it operational. The trails were distant and hard to follow, most tangled as well.’
‘Angelina!’ I cried with sudden realization. ‘You never told me you had been here alone for five years.’
‘I didn’t think you liked older women.’
‘I love them as long as they are you. You were lonely?’
‘Hideously. Which is why I volunteered to go after you. Inskipp had another volunteer, but he broke his leg.’
‘My darling – I’ll bet I know how that happened!’ She is not the blushing type, but she did lower her eyes at the thought.
‘We are getting ahead in sequence,’ Coypu said. ‘But that is what happened. We traced you from 1975 to 1807 – and traced He and his minions as well. There was a loop in time there, an anomaly of some kind that eventually sealed itself off. We could tell that it was about to collapse with you sealed inside of it and succeeded at last in forcing enough power into the helix to penetrate the sealed time loop just before it went down. That is when Angelina went back with the coordinates for your next skip in time, the long twenty-thousand-year jump after He. You had to go after him because the time paths were there to prove that you had followed him. Though of course history was clear by that point, and we knew how it would all end.’
‘You knew?’ I asked, feeling I had missed the point somewhere.
‘Of course. The entire nature of the attack was clear, though you all of course had to fulfill your destined roles.’
‘Could you spell it out again? And slower.’
‘Of course. You managed to destroy He’s operation twice in the remote past and eventually reset his machine and sent him forward to the twilight days of Earth. Here he spent an immense amount of time, almost two hundred years, climbing his way to power and uniting all of the planet’s resources. He was a genius, albeit a mad one, and could do this. He also remembered you, Jim, fading memories and half-insane ones after two hundred years, but he remembered enough to know you were the enemy. Therefore he launched a time war to destroy you before you could destroy him, trapping you as he thought on a planet about to be destroyed by atomic explosion. From there he returned to 1975 to attack the Corps. You came after him and he fled to 1807 to lay the time loop trap for you. I don’t know where he planned to go from there, but his plans appear to have been altered, and he went instead twenty thousand years ahead.’
‘I did that, altered the setting on his machine just before he left.’
‘That is all there is to it. We can relax now that it is over, and I do believe I’ll join you in that drink.’
‘Relax!’ The words emerged from my throat with a singularly nasty, grating sound. ‘From what you have said it sounds like I started the whole attack on the Special Corps by altering the setting on the time-helix that sent He to the world where he launched his campaign to destroy the Corps.’
‘That’s one way of looking at it.’
‘Is there any other? The way I see it He just bounces in a circle in time forever. Running from me, chasing me, running from me …. Arrrgh! When was he born? Where does he come from?’
‘Those terms are meaningless in this sort of temporal relationship. He exists only within this time loop. If you wish to say it, though it is most imprecise, it would be fair to state that he was never born. The situation exists apart from time as we normally know it. Such as the fact that you returned here with the information to be sent to yourself about the settings on the atomic bombs. Where did this information come from originally? From yourself. So you sent it to yourself in order to send it to yourself to inform yourself about the settings on the bombs in order …’
‘Enough!’ I groaned, reaching for the bottle with trembling hand. ‘Just mark the mission as being accomplished and put me in for a fat bonus.’
I refilled all the glasses and only when I came to Angelina’s did I realize she was no longer present. She had slipped away without a word while I was suffering over having instigated the whole time war, and I was just beginning to miss her and wondered where she had gone when she returned
‘They are fine,’ she said.
‘Who, who?’ I said in my best owl imitation. But when I saw the narrowing of Angelina’s eyes, I knew I had made a big mistake and I racked my time-trodden brain until understanding burst upon me. ‘Who indeed! Ho-ho-ho! You must excuse the small joke. Who is fine, you say. Why, our twin, cherubic, gurgling babies are fine. With true maternal instinct you have rushed to their side.’
‘They are here with me.’
‘Well, wheel the pram in!’
‘The babies,’ she said as they entered, with what I detected as a strong note of irony.
They were going on six years of age, a little fact that I had neglected to remember. They moved easily, solid chap
s with the disconcerting knack of walking in step with each other. Well muscled, their father’s firm heritage, I am happy to say, with a tempering of their mother’s looks.
‘You’ve been away a long time, Dad,’ one of them said.
‘Not by choice, James. The universe isn’t saved in a day.’
‘I’m James, he’s Bolivar. Welcome back.’
‘Well, thanks.’ Did I kiss them or what? They settled this by sticking out their hands, and I shook them each quite seriously. Good grips. This family thing was going to take some getting used to. Angelina beamed proudly, and I melted under that look and realized that it was all probably worth it.
‘Angelina, I think you have finally convinced me. The joys of married life seem to be worth the price of giving up the happy and carefree occupation of freelance thief ….’
‘Thief is the correct word,’ a nauseously familiar voice cried out. ‘And crook, con man, blackmailer, briber, and more.’ Inskipp stood in the doorway waving his florid face and a sheaf of papers in my direction. ‘Five years I have been waiting for you, diGriz, and this time you are not getting away. No excuses like time wars now. You crook, you steal from your own buddies, urggh!’
He said Urggh! because Angelina had popped a sleep capsule under his nose, and he folded over while the boys – good reflexes there – stepped forward and eased him gently to the floor. Angelina relieved him of the sheaf of papers while he went by.
‘After five years I need you more than this nasty old man does. Let’s burn this file and steal a ship before he comes to. It will be months before he can find us, and by that time something else will have happened that will need straightening out badly, and he will have to put us back to work again. Meanwhile, we can have a lovely crooked second honeymoon.’
‘Sounds great – but what about the boys? This is not the sort of trip one takes children on.’
‘You’re not leaving without us,’ Bolivar said. Where had I seen that unshakable scowl before? In the mirror I guess. ‘Where you go, we go. If it’s a matter of money, we can pay our own way. See.’
I saw indeed as he extended a great bundle of credits that could pay his way right across the galaxy. But I also had a quick glimpse of a familiar golden wallet.
‘Inskipp’s money! You robbed that poor old man while you should have been helping him.’ I flicked a quick look at James. ‘And I suppose you will be able to tell time during the trip with his wristwatch that I see suddenly on your arm?’
‘In their father’s footsteps,’ Angelina said proudly. ‘Of course they come with us. And don’t concern yourself with expenses, boys. Daddy can steal enough for all of us.’
It was too much. ‘Why not!’ I laughed. ‘Here’s to crime!’ I raised my glass.
‘Here’s to time,’ Coypu said, getting in the spirit of the thing.
‘Here’s to time crime!’ we cried together and drained our glasses and broke them against the wall, and Coypu smiled avuncularly after us as we grabbed the children’s hands and leaped lightly over Inskipp’s snoring body and were out the door and away.
There’s a bright and glorious universe out there, and we are going to enjoy every single bit of it.
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Also By Harry Harrison
Stainless Steel Rat
1. The Stainless Steel Rat (1961)
2. The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge (1970)
3. The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World (1972)
4. The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You! (1978)
5. The Stainless Steel Rat for President (1982)
6. A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born (1985)
7. The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted (1987)
8. The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues (1994)
9. Stainless Steel Visions (1992)
10. The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell (1996)
11. The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Circus (1999)
Bill, the Galactic Hero
1. Bill the Galactic Hero (1965)
2. Bill the Galactic Hero and the Planet of Robot Slaves (1989)
3. Bill the Galactic Hero and the Planet of the Bottled Brains (1990) (with Robert Sheckley)
4. Bill the Galactic Hero and the Planet of Tasteless Pleasure (1990) (with David Bischoff)
5. Bill the Galactic Hero and the Planet of the Zombie Vampires (1991) (with Jack C Haldeman, II)
6. Bill the Galactic Hero and the Planet of the Hippies from Hell (1991) (with David Bischoff) (aka The Planet of Ten Thousand Bars)
7. Bill the Galactic Hero: The Final Incoherent Adventure (1992) (with David Harris)
To the Stars
1. Homeworld (1980)
2. Wheelworld (1981)
3. Starworld (1981)
Eden
1. West of Eden (1984)
2. Winter in Eden (1986)
3. Return to Eden (1988)
Stars and Stripes
1. Stars and Stripes Forever (1998)
2. Stars and Stripes in Peril (2000)
3. Stars and Stripes Triumphant (2001)
Deathworld
1. Deathworld (1960)
2. Deathworld Two (1964)
3. Deathworld Three (1968)
Hammer and the Cross
1. The Hammer and the Cross (1993)
2. One King's Way (1994)
3. King and Emperor (1996) (with John Holm (Tom Shippey))
Other Novels
Planet of the Damned (1962) (aka A Sense of Obligation)
Plague from Space (1965)
The Man from P.I.G. (1968)
The Technicolor Time Machine (1968)
Captive Universe (1969)
In Our Hands, the Stars (1970) (aka The Daleth Effect)
The Jupiter Legacy (1970)
Spaceship Medic (1970)
Montezuma's Revenge (1972)
Tunnel Through the Deeps (1972) (aka A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!)
Stonehenge: Where Atlantis Died (1972) (with Leon E Stover)
Queen Victoria's Revenge (1974)
Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers (1974)
The Men from P.I.G. and R.O.B.O.T. (1974)
The California Iceberg (1975) (with James E Barry)
The Lifeship (1976) (with Gordon R Dickson) (aka Lifeboat)
Skyfall (1976)
The QEII Is Missing (1980)
Planet of No Return (1981)
The Jupiter Plague (1982)
Invasion: Earth (1982)
A Rebel in Time (1983)
The Turing Option (1992) (with Marvin Minsky)
Harry Harrison (1925 - 2012)
Harry Harrison was born Henry Maxwell Dempsey in Connecticut, in 1925. He is the author of a number of much-loved series including the Stainless Steel Rat and Bill the Galactic Hero sequences and the Deathworld Trilogy. He is known as a passionate advocate of Esperanto, the most popular of the constructed international languages, which appears in many of his novels. He has been publishing novels for over half a century and is perhaps best known for his seminal novel of overpopulation, Make Room! Make Room!, which was adapted into the cult film Soylent Green. He died in 2012.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Harry Harrison 2012
A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born Copyright © Harry Harrison 1985
The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted Copyright © Harry Harrison 1987
The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues Copyright © Harry Harrison 1994
The Stainless Steel Rat Copyright © Harry Harrison 1961
The Stainless Steel Rat’s Revenge Copyright © Harry Harrison 1970
The Stainless Steel R
at Saves the World Copyright © Harry Harrison 1972
All rights reserved.
The right of Harry Harrison to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2012 by Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 12265 9
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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The Stainless Steel Rat eBook Collection Page 115